Become a more confident language teacher.
Map Talk is a content-based, communicative language teaching strategy that our guest author, Benjamin Tinsley, has been using with his classes and empowering other teachers to try in their own instructional contexts. During a Map Talk activity, the class views a map while the teacher describes what is visible and leads a conversation that combines…
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Most of us teach language within four classroom walls, and yet the physical space of our room neither defines nor constrains us: our language classes are boundless. The connections that we help our students to make span time periods, political borders, races, and interests. If we are lucky, they might even span that uncomfortable space…
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One of our family’s favorite ways to get the squiggly wiggly’s out is with Cosmic Kids Yoga. In each episode, Jamie tells a story and acts it out with yoga poses and other forms of movement (ex: jumping jacks, running in place, etc.). Our kids love the stories, love Jamie’s accent, and love yoga. Adapting…
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“Write and Discuss” is one of the core strategies in a comprehension-based teacher’s bag of tricks. It is easy-peasy and adaptable for many uses! In this post, I’m sharing with you a demo of Write and Discuss along with step-by-step instructions so that you can feel confident making this power-packed strategy your own! An abbreviated version…
Read MoreWhether you call them Stations or Centers, you probably love them—and so do your students. Stations give you a laissez-faire teaching day and provide lots of movement and small group interaction for students. Stations do not, however, come without challenges. Stations often take quite a bit of prep work. For the proficiency oriented, comprehension based…
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As language teachers, our goal for our students is to be more proficient in the target language when they complete our course than when they began. We probably have other goals for our students (being more kind, more empathetic, more responsible, more culturally aware), but all of these objectives fit into the overarching mission of…
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For some of us, change happens fast. We take in information, make a decision, and take action immediately. For others of us, change happens slowly. We take in information, wrestle with it, take an action step, take a step back, take in more information, wrestle some more, take a few action steps, take a step…
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I recently finished up Season 2 of Stranger things (!!!!), and Dungeons & Dragons is a big part of the show. Of course, I was never allowed anywhere near the game when I was growing up, due to its dark nature, but watching the show I have been quite fascinated by it. Mostly I just…
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Do you use Acquisition Driven Instruction? I began using Acquisition Driven Instruction in 2010; I just didn’t know it as that. At the time, I was teaching almost exclusively with TPRS® (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), and I would have described myself as a TPRS® teacher. With time, I began using a wide variety…
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View this post on Instagram Stories have the power to inspire, to delight, to teach, to challenge. We need stories! Our students need stories. Find ways to bring new stories and new forms of storytelling into your classes!! #spanishteachers #spanishtribe #foreignlanguage A post shared by Martina Bex (@comprehensibleclassroom) on Jan 11, 2018 at 10:57am PST…
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